Build your own mini-CNC artbot for $70

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For those of you who can relate to being artistically challenged, there is hope for you today. Pictured in the video above is the Piccolo, a tiny CNC artbot that is capable of making your artistic dreams a reality. Created by diatom studio, the Piccolo is an open-source piece of hardware that will cost you only $70 to purchase and put together. Not at all a bad deal for a CNC machine!

Designed to allow you to create 2D or 3D artwork on a small scale, the Piccolo really is meant to allow you to experiment and fool around with CNC design. You won’t be painting the Sistine Chapel with one of these devices, but you certainly could make custom business cards or interesting designs on your walls.

Because the diatom team decided to control their device with an Arduino board, the small-scale things you can do are only limited by your know-how when it comes to customizing and programming the software. For example, the above video shows off the light sensing functionality the Piccolo has — it can be programmed to draw pictures according to different light levels, allowing you to create some cool effects. With the open-source nature of the Arduino libraries, you could tailor the Piccolo’s actions to your specific needs. You could throw a temperature and liquid sensor into the mix and tell the Piccolo to draw spirals when it sensed water or a temperature trigger. That’s very simplistic of course, but you can begin to see the possibilities.

As mentioned above, the Piccolo kit is going to cost $70, coming with parts that were all digitally created on a larger CNC-type machine. The time-lapse portion of the video shows a simple assembly process complete with instructions so don’t worry about getting intimidated. While the kit is currently not available for purchase, diatom hopes to get kits up for sale very soon. At $70, maybe you could buy a whole fleet of Piccolo’s to make yourself some custom wallpaper!